Harry's Placehttp://hurryupharry.org
Liberty, if it means anything, is the right to tell people what they don't want to hearTue, 18 Dec 2018 20:39:18 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.8Hungary’s “slave law” sparks protestshttp://hurryupharry.org/2018/12/18/hungarys-slave-law-sparks-protests/
http://hurryupharry.org/2018/12/18/hungarys-slave-law-sparks-protests/#respondTue, 18 Dec 2018 19:50:20 +0000http://hurryupharry.org/?p=119201When the leader of a government proudly proclaims an “illiberal state”: when his government passes a law restricting press freedom and undermines independent media; when that government tolerates antisemitism in its own ranks; when it forces the closure of a respected independent university and turns it founder into a figure of demonic omnipotent evil; and when tightens its control of the judiciary; is it any surprise that it also attacks workers’ rights?

Hungary is seeing its largest protests in years, triggered by an employee-hostile law. But for the protesters, it’s about a lot more. Meanwhile, the government, led by strongman PM Viktor Orban, smells a conspiracy.

For days, thousands of Hungarians have been protesting against the Orban government’s social policies and against the anti-democratic restructuring of their country. It’s a wave of protests the likes of which Hungary hasn’t experienced in a long time.

In some cases, police have been using violence and teargas against protesters in the last few days, even though before that there had merely been some scuffles with the officers. Dozens of people, some of them not even part of the protests, were arrested, and many were only released after 12 hours or more.
…..The wave of protests was triggered by an amendment to Hungarian labor law, now known to the public as the “slave law,” which was passed in parliament last week. The law increases the possible number of overtime hours per year per employee from 250 to 400. At the same time, employers can now take three years instead of one year to pay overtime.
…..

It is unclear how long the current protests will last. Opposition parties have called for protest rallies in the coming days as well. The Orban government responded in its own way: It claimed the protests were initiated by US billionaire George Soros and the forces behind him, as well as by people who want to flood Hungary with migrants. In addition, the government says, provocateurs and foreign criminals take part in the protests, with the goal of degrading Hungary abroad.

Soros? Foreign criminals? Of course! How could Hungarian workers possibly find anything objectionable about this law?

“Those who back the Zionist State of Israel usually have very deep pockets to finance and fuel campaigns to ensure that any discussions or debates about Palestine are not only closed down but those behind them are also silenced and punished.”

“Those who seek justice for Palestinians are not known for taking up arms and slaughtering innocent Jews inside synagogues. Zionists who suggest otherwise cause harm to Jews everywhere by giving credibility to armed and very dangerous right wing anti-Semites.”

The family and friends of the eight yeshiva students murdered in the Merkaz Harav massacre 10 years ago may beg to differ. A terrorist walked into a yeshiva and started shooting the boys while they were at prayer. Hamas praised the murders while informally claiming responsibility for them.

According to Hamas‘ website (and apparently Ridley) these kinds of attacks are merely about seeking to end injustice:

“For Hamas, all types of legitimate resistance are practiced to end the oppressions and injustices imposed by Israel, and it is Hamas’s right then to resist with all means, including armed resistance, guaranteed by divine and international laws”

Ridley has been vocal in her support for Hamas over the years saying (among other things):

“If I could use my Palestinian citizenship, it would be to vote Ismail Haniyeh and Hamas back in again in Gaza. Victory to intifada 3! Victory to Hamas!“

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http://hurryupharry.org/2018/12/17/yvonne-ridley-strikes-again/feed/0Jeremy Corbyn and an Exodus from Britainhttp://hurryupharry.org/2018/12/15/jeremy-corbyn-and-an-exodus-from-britain/
http://hurryupharry.org/2018/12/15/jeremy-corbyn-and-an-exodus-from-britain/#respondSat, 15 Dec 2018 11:08:58 +0000http://hurryupharry.org/?p=119187On September 5th 2018, the Jewish Chronicle published an article stating that 40% of British Jews would consider leaving the UK if Jeremy Corbyn became Prime Minister. Immediately, Corbynistas (which is, by the way, a hilarious name for an aggressively racist hate-mob) decried the poll and Jewish people themselves as ‘hysterical’.

The sad fact is Jewish people are not hysterical. If you understand one thing about Jewish history it’s that antisemitism, known as the oldest hatred, has been blighting the lives of Jews since time began. It may be that no harm (and please note that ‘harm’ does not necessarily mean another Holocaust) will befall the Jewish people if Corbyn comes to power but based on the historical experience of the Jews, and Corbyn’s own personal history of antisemitism, it is not unreasonable for Jews to be nervous. Jews, better than most people, understand the consequences of not getting out while you still can.

Jeremy Corbyn has immersed himself in a movement which is anti-Semitic. The hard-left has espoused antisemitism (disguised as anti-Israel sentiment) since before the Cold War. They use the same anti-Semitic tropes such as a Jewish conspiracy (utilised by many groups including Corbyn supporters) to demonise Jews and Israel. Corbyn has also aligned himself with organisations and people who have murdered Jews or who seek to murder Jews. He also, now quite famously, accused a British Zionist of not really being British despite having lived here for ‘a long time’. This is a specific form of British antisemitism where Jews are tolerated but never quite accepted.

Even if you were to argue that Corbyn himself isn’t an anti-Semite (and I would strongly disagree) you cannot disagree that he has aligned himself with those who are – and yes in this case you can be guilty by association. He has repeatedly refused to deal with it in his party. He also refuses to speak out against his followers who attack Jews and their allies on Twitter and in the party. Quite frankly, he doesn’t give British Jews much hope that he would suddenly change his tune if he were ever to become the most powerful man in the country.

It is clear that something has changed internationally and antisemitism which existed before, constantly simmering under the surface has now once again bubbled over. Even someone like me who engages with the subject of antisemitism for a living has been shocked by the aggressive vitriol being poured on Jews in 2018.

In the 2018 FBI Report on Hate Crimes, Jews, despite making up just 2% of the US population accounted for 58% of the victims of religiously motivated hate crimes and in the Gilets Jaunes riots in Paris antisemitic rhetoric was rife with Macron being described as the ‘whore of the Jews’. In Germany, protestors were seen to be chanting ‘Adolf Hitler’ and giving the Hitler Salute, along while flying the Palestinian flag.

In a 2014 article titled Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe? by Jeffery Goldberg, he wrote, ‘the Shoah served for a while as a sort of inoculation against the return of overt Jew-hatred—but the effects of the inoculation, it is becoming clear, are wearing off.’ Goldberg’s assessments were correct and despite the power that Corbyn may hold if he is ever to become Prime Minster, the reality is though, he is as much a symptom of a greater problem exhibited in the left, than he is the cause of this recent bubbling over of antisemitism in British life.

Corbyn’s supporters and people who align themselves with the progressive left see the world through the very specific lens of anti-imperialism, and they have decided (ironically, in a paternalistic and therefore imperialist way) who is classed as oppressor and oppressed and they have decided quite conclusively that Israel, and all Jews who support it, are white oppressors.

David Hirsh, one of the most important voices in the fight against left wing antisemitism stated, ‘For some, antizionism, anti-Americanism, anti-imperialism and antisemitism close in on each other; they share the same resonances, the same feelings, the same enemies, the same images and the same discourses.”

Jews are antisemitically framed as white colonisers who have stolen land from the indigenous Palestinians and represent the very worst of white Western imperialism. This is patently abused as the Jews are indigenous to the Middle East and are even more closely related to the Palestinians than they are to non-Jewish Europeans. Incidentally, they don’t understand that their aggressive Jew-hatred consistently proves the need for a sovereign Jewish state. Left wing obsessive anti-Imperialism means that in the battle to defeat Imperialism, Jews and Zionists are fair game. We have seen this up and down the country where Jews have been silenced and even forced out of organisations for vocally supporting Israel. In Birmingham in 2014 protestors stormed a Tesco’s and threw Kosher food on the floor and attacked police. They ‘justified’ this violently anti-Semitic behaviour as a protest against goods that were produced in Israel (they argue, again antisemitically, for a boycott of Israel), ignoring the fact that Kosher food is produced in many places other than Israel.

We also see this manifestation of antisemitism in the erasure of Jews from the anti-racist movement (something that leaves Jews vulnerable to attacks). Leftist progressives seem to be unable to understand that Jews, though many pass as white, are not white and do not fit into their myopic world view. After the Massacre in Pittsburgh in the Tree of Life Synagogue on October 27th, the Black Lives Matter official twitter account couldn’t even mention Jews or antisemitism in their condemnation of this crime. So the question is, if people who claim to be anti-racist do not stand up for Jews, then who does?

Against this backdrop, asking the British Jewish community to have confidence that their civil liberties will be secure if Corbyn becomes PM is for some, asking too much. Even if laws were not passed against Jews (or Zionists), would a Corbyn government defend the British Jewish community – who are almost overwhelmingly Zionist – from violence and persecution?

Perhaps though, you think that British Jews should have faith that even if Corbyn and his supporters are let loose that the British people would defend them? Despite there being some wonderful non-Jewish allies who have taken it upon themselves to fight alongside Jewish people, they do seem to be relatively small in number. In an ComRes poll conducted on the 3rd December 2018, 39% of those polled indicated they would vote for Labour with its current leadership. This gives some Jewish Brits no comfort. Even if non-Jewish British people missed the first accusations of antisemitism in the Labour Party in 2015, this summer was quite a different story. It would have been impossible to miss this summer’s avalanche of evidence cascading from the feet of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party. So what does this tell British Jews? It tells them that those who say they would still vote for Labour are either anti-Semites themselves or they are apologists for an antisemite.

Whether you still have faith in Britain and her people is up to you, but dismissing the very real fears of a minority community that numbers just 250,000 is cruel at best and antisemitic at worst. On the 14th of December, Lord Alan Sugar appeared on Good Morning Britain and stated that he would leave the UK if Jeremy Corbyn became Prime Minister. It is well known that Lord Sugar is Jewish and in response Owen Jones tweeted, ‘Celebrate good times, come on!’. For many British Jews they are trying to cope with the collective trauma of 2000 years of the most intense persecution in history whilst trying to process how a country they were once proud to call home could suddenly feel so hostile and unwelcoming.

If 40% of a protected minority would leave the country if the leader of HM Opposition becomes Prime Minister then perhaps they are not hysterical, just maybe they have seen the the writing on the wall and they’re afraid of what it says.

(March of Life at the Brandenburg Gate, against racism, antisemitism and Israel hatred.)

In 2018 Germany appointed the diplomat Dr. Felix Klein to the newly created post of Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against Antisemitism. Klein has expressed his determination to fight all forms of Jew-hatred, including the oft-ignored Islamic antisemitism that has been on the rise in Germany for two decades. Daniel Rickenbacher examines the challenges facing Klein, including the rising appeal of ‘Pop-Islam’ to second and third generation Muslims who have only have a rudimentary understanding of their faith. ‘This Islamist pop culture may be the most dangerous propagator of antisemitic ideas in Germany and Europe in general nowadays,’ argues Dr. Rickenbacher.

FACING UP TO THE REALITY OF ISLAMIC ANTISEMITISM

Several incidents in 2018 have highlighted the problem of Islamic antisemitism in Germany. In April, a Syrian immigrant attacked a young Israeli wearing a kippa in Berlin. The attack was caught on video, causing a scandal.[1] In the same month, two antisemitic rappers of Muslim background received the Echo music award, the German equivalent of the American Grammy. In one of their more innocuous songs they had sung: ‘My body is more defined than that of Auschwitz inmates.’ The ensuing controversy led to the abolition of the Echo awards.[2] Many observers and politicians, including German chancellor Angela Merkel, expressed the view that Islamic antisemitism in Germany was a relatively recent phenomenon, starting in earnest with the arrival of more than a million immigrants of mostly Muslim background in 2015.[3] This view, however, is quite wrong.

In fact, Islamic antisemitism has been a problem in Germany for at least two decades. In 2000, when a synagogue in the German city of Düsseldorf was firebombed, then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder called for ‘an insurgency of decent people’ against German right-wing extremism. When the police discovered that the perpetrators were not German neo-Nazis but two young antisemites of Moroccan and Jordanian descent, this inconvenient fact was largely ignored by politicians and the media.[4] Since then, there have been a legion of incidents where Jewish children were bullied, Jewish soccer players attacked on the field or groups of tourists harassed by Muslim antisemites – occasionally prompting headlines and condemnations by politicians. Stephan Kramer, the General Secretary of the Central Council of the Jews, the Jewish umbrella organisation in Germany, observed already in 2007 that the ‘the violence in the Muslim camp is comparable to that in the extreme right.’[5]Apparently, these words had little consequence. READ MORE.

]]>http://hurryupharry.org/2018/12/13/fathom-21-pop-islam-how-germany-is-tackling-the-new-islamic-antisemitism/feed/0Checking in on Gallowayhttp://hurryupharry.org/2018/12/10/checking-in-on-galloway/
http://hurryupharry.org/2018/12/10/checking-in-on-galloway/#respondMon, 10 Dec 2018 22:50:29 +0000http://hurryupharry.org/?p=119169Ever since he stopped compulsively running for political office (and sometimes actually winning), we haven’t paid much attention to the horror show that is George Galloway.

But one of his latest tweets is noteworthy for its downright Trumpian undercurrents.

]]>http://hurryupharry.org/2018/12/10/checking-in-on-galloway/feed/0The Info Wars Subversion Projecthttp://hurryupharry.org/2018/12/10/the-info-wars-subversion-project/
http://hurryupharry.org/2018/12/10/the-info-wars-subversion-project/#respondMon, 10 Dec 2018 22:14:46 +0000http://hurryupharry.org/?p=119168It would appear that a British attempt to counter the affects of Putin’s propaganda machine has been uncovered and is now under attack.

The Foreign Office minister, Alan Duncan, has ordered an investigation into reports the government provided funding to a Scottish-based company meant to counter online Russian propaganda, which also spread unfavourable views about Jeremy Corbyn.

Duncan has previously responded to a parliamentary written question on the subject. His answer showed that in the 2017-18 financial year the Foreign Office funded the Institute for Statecraft’s Integrity Initiative with £296,500. This financial year, the sum was due rise to £1,961,000, the answer said.

According to the report, the body’s programme is supposed to counter Russian disinformation by using “clusters” of journalists and others throughout Europe – with a unit reportedly proposed in Lithuania – using social media to respond.

But its official Twitter feed retweeted anti-Corbyn messages such as the one calling the Labour leader a “useful idiot”. It added: “His open visceral anti-westernism helped the Kremlin cause, as surely as if he had been secretly peddling Westminster tittle-tattle for money.”

Other messages targeted Corbyn’s chief aide, Seumas Milne. The Institute for Statecraft retweeted a newspaper report that said: “Milne is not a spy – that would be beneath him. But what he has done, wittingly or unwittingly, is work with the Kremlin agenda.”

The Guardian were rather relaxed in their reporting. It turns out that the Integrity Initiative re-tweeted a couple (meaning two) negative tweets about Corbyn. They also re-tweeted a couple of negative stories about the Tories. But that couldn’t stop RT regular Bristol University Prof David Miller from going off on one as if the Manhattan Project had been uncovered mid atom splitting, though come to think of it the Russians had that project thoroughly infiltrated…

Check out what he had to say to Sputnik on the matter:

David Miller: The idea that campaigns like this are about countering Russian disinformation is in a way part of the disinformation of this kind of activity. When you see the kinds of activity they are engaged in, it is essentially promoting anti-Russian views and activities.

Yes, they have other motives, and yes this is about what they refer to as Russian active measures — this is about western active measures, i.e. covert propaganda activities and the aim is to show that the kinds of messages that they want to distribute and promote are widely held and they do that by recruiting a wide range of different people that one might think don’t have any connection with each other but the documents suggest that they do in fact have connection with each other.

He must be a Zionist for it looks like irony is something that escapes him.

]]>http://hurryupharry.org/2018/12/10/the-info-wars-subversion-project/feed/0Leave will probably have to win a second referendum. But even winning again will not secure Brexit if we make the same two mistakes again. By Professor Alan Johnsonhttp://hurryupharry.org/2018/12/10/leave-will-probably-have-to-win-a-second-referendum-but-even-winning-again-will-not-secure-brexit-if-we-make-the-same-two-mistakes-again-by-professor-alan-johnson/
http://hurryupharry.org/2018/12/10/leave-will-probably-have-to-win-a-second-referendum-but-even-winning-again-will-not-secure-brexit-if-we-make-the-same-two-mistakes-again-by-professor-alan-johnson/#respondMon, 10 Dec 2018 11:05:11 +0000http://hurryupharry.org/?p=119163The England manager Alf Ramsey famously told the team before extra time in the 1966 World Cup Final, ‘You have won it once, now go out and win it again’. This is the week when it will became clear that the 52 per cent will have to win it again. This article is not about what a democratic outrage the ‘second referendum’ is, how it will likely poison our politics, open the door to the far-right, and destroy what little trust is left in what the Italian political theorist Norberto Bobbio (along with anybody with political common sense) calls the rules of the game. Instead, I ask why winning one referendum was not enough to secure Brexit. I think there are two broad kinds of reason.

Reason 1: Leave failed to make Brexit a popular national project

Winning a referendum was not enough because we failed to build even a semblance of hegemony i.e. mass, popular and active consent around the project of Brexit.

After the referendum came the failure of the government, the Tory party and the entire Leave campaign, Lexit included, to envision, design and negotiate a Brexit that was able to command parliamentary and public support.

We should have developed a positive and popular vision of the future – an open, generous, civic Brexit – and then agreed negotiating objectives to achieve it, but we failed to do either.

We should have given ourselves the time to do both by refusing to trigger Article 50 until we were ready. And boy, were we not ready. I recall the look on the faces of the civil servants shortly before Referendum Day when someone asked them if they were prepared for a Leave victory.

Stupidly, a government which had never considered a leave vote to be a serious possibility, and so had made no preparations for one, decided to trigger Article 50 when it was still totally unprepared, pitching a bitterly divided country on the precipice of a nasty little culture war into highly complex (but now time-limited) negotiations about nothing less than unraveling 40 years of EU membership and establishing new economic, political and security relationships with the EU and the rest of the world. And all this after a referendum without a threshold and resulting in only a slim 52-48 majority.

No effort was made to heal the bitter divisions that existed within the country and between the nations. We should have tried might and main to bring leavers and remainers together.

We could have been bold. A ‘UK Brexit Convention’ should have been established to organize a national-popular conversation about leaving the EU, to develop a shared vision of our future outside the political institutions of the EU and, on that basis, to outline the broad, achievable negotiating objectives that would have popular support in the future negotiations with the EU.

The imperative should have been to reach out to as many as possible in the 48 per cent who had been rightly disgusted by aspects of the Leave campaign, were in shock at the outcome, and were so fearful of what would happen next that they were reluctant to reconcile themselves to the result.

Leave had won and it was our responsibility to convince and to reassure (however many times we were smeared). Instead, we replied in kind, lashing out at the ‘Remoaners’, pushing many into the arms of a Second Referendum. That was also stupid.

We failed to understand that given the narrowness of Leave’s victory, Brexit would now either become a popular multi-national project marked by a spirit of negotiation and compromise, or it would fail.

We could have tried to learn from how Scotland prepared for devolution, drawing in civil society and building an impressive consensus. We could have decided to involve millions in a conversation about the Brexit they wanted, setting up in popular local assemblies, the peoples ideas and concerns feeding in to extraordinary joint sessions of the parliaments, and so on.

We could have treated the TUC and CBI as valued stakeholders, fully included in the preparations.

Even if such an effort failed, it would have widened the Leave coalition, reassured many and marginalized the ultras.

But the government did the opposite.

It narrowed the circle of participation, treated the home nations as supplicants, and excluded the other parties from the process. It even tried to use Brexit for narrow party advantage, calling a snap election after promising not to. Worse, to provide an excuse for that election, it lied to the public, accusing the other parties of ‘frustrating Brexit’. In fact, the government was getting its way in the Commons on all the key Brexit votes.

The truth was that the polls told May that Corbyn was a Loser, so she decided to shatter the slim chance of a cross-party Brexit in pursuit of a Tory landslide. She blew the slim majority she had. More time wasted. More stupidity.

And then there was Scotland. Here, we should hang our heads in shame. Scotland is a nation. That is worth repeating: Scotland is a nation. The Scottish people voted 6 to 4 to Remain, and this created a huge problem for Leavers whether we realized it or not. (Almost without exception, we didn’t.) To take the Scottish nation out of the EU against its expressed will should have been a matter of real angst for Leavers. (It wasn’t.) At the every least the situation demanded a huge effort to recognise, negotiate and compromise. Instead, Scotland has been treated in a frankly colonial manner, as if it were a rebellious province to be lectured at by the metropolitan power, or a joke to be mocked by baying Tory MPs in the Commons. (Frankly, I am surprised every Scot does not back independence as matter of elementary self-respect, faced with all this.)

To sum up, we did not understand that the first referendum was largely a negative vote against the EU, had only been narrowly won, and was lost in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and so could only be a staging post en route to a new project: building a hegemony behind a new andpositive national-popular project of Brexit.

For that we needed the political nous and élan of an Antonio Gramsci but we got the wide-boy chancerdom of Aaron Banks and then a failure of governance of a truly breathtaking kind.

Reason 2: Leave just stopped campaigning after 23 June 2016. EUism just got started. Only one side has been arguing a case for two years. So Leave got monstered.

The second reason Leave will have to win a second referendum is that the Leave campaign folded up on 23 June 2016 after winning the first. We lost the intellectual battle of ideas comprehensively, largely because we fled the field. As a result, we were turned onto monsters by a Remain campaign that went into overdrive after 23 June and set out to frame-up, mock, demonize Brexit and demoralize and monster supporters of Brexit.

The Remainer-Bolsheviks simply refused to accept the outcome of a democratic referendum.

They said ‘Bollocks to Brexit!’ and ‘Bin Brexit!’ and ‘No to Tory Brexit!’ as if leaving the European Union was a Tory government policy like Section 28 or the Poll Tax rather than the outcome of the biggest democratic vote this country has ever held: a vote that was calledby Parliament, won by Leave and then endorsed by a General Election in which parties pledged to respect the result and take us out of the European Union won over 80 per cent of the vote.

The Guardian’s Martin Kettle urged Britons not to ‘bend the knee to Brexit’, as if they were mounting a heroic resistance to an occupying army rather than subverting the democratic decision of their own fellow Britons. The point, of course, is that much of the commentariat think the 17.4 million are an invading army, many do not acknowledge such fellowship or feel that they share membership in a political community with the 52 per cent.

After 23 June 2016 the BBC seemed to believe that all good news should be prefaced by the words ‘Despite Brexit’. The liberal broadsheets ran campaigns, either formal (The Independent) or informal (The Guardian) to overturn the referendum.

The neoliberal and social neoliberal great and good had finally found a mission beyond money-grubbing and ‘what works’. Richard Branson, a man more interested in the Moon than Macclesfield, cheered on a weekly propaganda newspaper devoted to overturning the result, from his hammock in the Caribbean. Alistair Campbell became its Editor-at-Large. He had adamantly opposed giving the British people one vote on the EU Constitution / ‘Lisbon Treaty’ but was now apparently apoplectic that they were not getting two votes on Brexit. (You could drown in the bad faith. Almost without exception, those backing a second ‘Peoples Vote’ vehemently opposed a first Peoples Vote.)

The Labour Party, forever sniffing the electoral air while pretending it had a real-world Brexit policy, eventually crept into line. Remainer No 1 Gina Miller let the cat out of the bag though, telling the Guardian that ‘May’s latest plan does, rather inconveniently, appear to pass the six tests for Brexit that Keir Starmer laid out, crucially, protecting workers’ rights. It is the very sort of Brexit that Corbyn said he would support at the Labour party conference earlier this year.’

Labour promised to renegotiate the deal in double quick time claiming it could secure for the UK a permanent customs union + a say in EU’s own trade deals + the ability to make trade deals of our own + a shiny new ultra-close relationship to the single market that wasn’t membership, you understand, but which would give us total access and the exact same benefits while also – hey presto! – allowing us to ignore the rules on free movement and state support. Labour also promised to remove the Mike Ashley regime at Newcastle United and fund the purchase of a new striker and a creative midfielder in the January window to avoid relegation. Ok, I made the last one up, but it is not any less likely to happen than Labour’s ‘Brexit plan’.

The liberal centre told itself that what had happened on 23 June 2016 was a kind of huge Farageist political belch that they were not obliged to respect. They rarely asked themselves why 52 per cent of Britons had voted to leave the EU. When they did, boy it was an ugly sight. Typical was The Guardian’s Matthew D’Ancona. You are all just ‘bigots’ he raged.

And so, month by month, we allowed the first referendum to be reframed as 17.4 million stupid old racists voting for stupid old racism. Now there is a bidding war. Perhaps it will be won by those who claim that overturning the referendum result is a form of anti-fascism. Or who knows, maybe someone will trump that by proposing to recategorise Brexit as a hate crime.

I fear the 17.4 million leavers have taken all this in: you despise us and that you do not feel that you share membership with us in a political community. (Which begs the question, so why should we share one with you?)

But much of this is our fault.

We stopped pointing out the reasonableness, the democratic temper, and the egalitarian thrust of the profound British scepticism about the entire direction of ‘the EU project’.

When we decided to stay in the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1975 we were staying in an economic area. However, over time, and especially in the last 20 years, the EEC underwent a great transformation into the European Union, a structure-cum-ongoing-project of non-democratic governance and constitutionally enshrined neo-liberalism that blocks radical projects of redistributionist social democracy and is now proving itself a breeding ground for the far-right (the Francoist success in Andalucia this week is only the latest).

That was the great transformation we were right to try and detach ourselves from.

But we stopped saying that. Instead we allowed the Remainers to use the government’s divisions and all-round incompetence to recast the EU in a new and rose-tinted light as ‘the good deal we already have’.

It is hard to put a label on the first expression of this great transformation, i.e. the weird new form of non-democratic governance that the EU is. (I am a Professor of Democratic Theory and Practice and I cannot tell you what the f*** it is.)

But what became clear was that the great transformation was being wrought – just as the founders planned it, by the way – by increments and by a series of inter-governmental treaties that the peoples were almost never allowed to express their view about.

On the few occasions when the elites failed to prevent the people from voting they rejected the great transformation every time. But those popular votes were ignored and the people told to vote again until they Got It Right. As the former EU Chief Manuel Barroso (since hired by Goldman Sachs) put it: ‘They must go on voting until they get it right.’

Millions of ordinary Britons came to understand that a kind of one-way ratchet effect was in operation, creating a uniquely distant, entirely opaque, wholly technocratic (for example, anyone could see the European ‘Parliament’ was a Potemkin Parliament), and dangerously non-democratic form of governance.

They knew this was an elite-led project happening above their heads and beyond their say. They knew all the main parties were EUist and none would deign to reflect the concerns of almost half the country.

They knew it was an unfinished project but they could see clearly the direction of travel – they only had to listen to what the European leaders were saying (and by the way, are still saying).

And so, after finally being invited to do so in a referendum called by their elected parliament, and after weighing the pros and cons, 52 per cent of the British people decided that while they very much wanted good relations with their European friends and allies, they no longer wanted their own country to be a part of that grand non-democratic EU project, thank you very much.

But since 23 June we stopped telling that story and allowed ourselves to be reduced to wrinklies, thickos and racists.

The second ‘economic‘ part of the great transformation of the European project has been its hijack by forces of neoliberal capitalist globalisation since the 1980s. ‘The EU has turned into a powerful engine of liberalization in the service of deep economic restructuring of social life’ as Wolfgang Streeck put it in the LRB on 14 July 2016. The EU is – as Richard Tuck argued in ‘The Left-wing case for Brexit’ in the US democratic left journal Dissent – ‘a constitutional order tailor-made for the interests of global capitalism.’ Even boosters of the EU project such as Jan-Werner Muller admits that ‘[German Chancellor] Merkel wants for the Euro Zone … rigid rules and legal frameworks beyond the reach of democratic decision-making’ (LRB 9 February 2012: 18).

The EU ‘remains locked in a deflationary logic, alienating all but its upper-middle classes from the project of continued integration’ wrote Susan Watkins in New Left Review. The journalist and writer Paul Mason observed that ‘[the EUs] central bank is committed, by treaty, to favour deflation and stagnation over growth. State aid to stricken industries is prohibited. The austerity we deride in Britain as a political choice is, in fact, written into the EU treaty as a non-negotiable obligation. So are the economic principles of the Thatcher era.’ (Mason then voted to Remain in the EU.)

With his eye on the punishment of Greece, economist Larry Eliot observed that ‘The structural adjustment programmes forced on those countries that have required financial bailouts have involved savage attacks on workers’ rights, including collective bargaining.’ He went on: ‘Brussels has become a honeypot for corporate lobbyists demanding deregulation and the transatlantic trade and investment partnership (TTIP).’

The crisis of the eurozone from 2010 even led to the removal of elected governments and their replacement with compliant technocrats by the troika of the EU, the European Central Bank, and the IMF. The markets were kept happy, and the euro was kept intact, but the price was high: as BBC Europe editor, Gavin Hewitt, put it in his valuable bookThe Lost Continent, democracy was ‘discarded like unwanted clothing.’ (It is worth reading that last sentence again the next time you are tempted to smear Leave voters.)

To sum up, we stopped making the democratic case against the EU. That would not have mattered so much – we were on our way out, after all – if we had elaborated a popular vision of post-Brexit Britain. But we didn’t do that either. The combination of these two failures has proved fatal.

Conclusion

To recap the argument, winning a referendum was not enough to secure Brexit because we failed to envision, design and negotiate a Brexit that was able to command parliamentary and public support. And because only one side – Remain – continued to fight the framing war after the votes were counted.

If those two mistakes are repeated, even winning a second referendum will not secure Brexit.

Not developed here, but implicit throughout, has been the idea that the only Brexit that can succeed now – or, given the shambles of the last two years, more likely, a generation from now, after the EU has cracked up under the weight of its own contradictions, as we used to say – is a multinational, popular, and explicitly civic Brexit that is one part of a radical programme to put British politics back together again by creating a democratic, federal and internationalist UK that is built for the many not the few.

]]>http://hurryupharry.org/2018/12/10/leave-will-probably-have-to-win-a-second-referendum-but-even-winning-again-will-not-secure-brexit-if-we-make-the-same-two-mistakes-again-by-professor-alan-johnson/feed/0The Nazis are Gone but Human Frailty Remainshttp://hurryupharry.org/2018/12/09/the-nazis-are-gone-but-human-frailty-remains/
http://hurryupharry.org/2018/12/09/the-nazis-are-gone-but-human-frailty-remains/#respondSun, 09 Dec 2018 07:23:37 +0000http://hurryupharry.org/?p=119157I used to spend a lot of time killing Nazis. In my head. I attacked them on the streets of Berlin, stabbed them in Occupied Paris, gunned them down with my Sten Gun on D-Day. I looked out the window at school and saw their planes blacken the English skies and myself pumping bullets into those planes while sitting in my Spitfire. I killed most Nazis during French and Classical Civilisation I think.

For a long time it was a great regret of mine that they were long gone by the time I was old enough to join the army. In my teenage years I wished I’d been born in the 1920s just so that I could get a crack at them. I haven’t travelled widely in Europe but the names of Krakow, Warsaw, Minsk, Prague always had the aura of death about them putting me off visiting.

Of course they’re all gone now. They really are. The actual Nazis that is, the ones who invaded countries, swore an oath of allegiance to Adolph Hitler and served his commands to kill, to destroy, to murder. Those who exist now are poor imitations, they may adopt the same symbols and quote him and his generals at any opportunity but they are not the same breed.

The human desire for a strong leader and the need to heap upon such a leader adoration beyond any rational measure is of course still alive and well. We see the same kind of adoration Hitler inspired in the way Saint Jeremy is viewed by his own foot soldiers. We see it in the way Putin finds hero worship in Russia and parts of the Crimea and in Venezuela’s Chavez, despite the pitiful conditions both placed their countries in.

People are talking about antisemitism in the UK and elsewhere at the moment. Fair enough, but antisemitism needs to be placed in the current climate of more general political and economic instability. The Jews suffer because we are the pullers of strings, we are all representatives of the Jew people hate, those Jews themselves have been made into representatives of the things people fear the most. We are all Phillip Green, we are all Karl Marx, we are all Rothschild, we are all Soros, we are all Netanyahu.

Our enemy today may not be the Nazis but the weaknesses of human nature that brought the Nazis to power are still in play. We can fight radical politics but not with guns or bullets (or Spitfires). Instead we need to convince those around us that there aren’t simple solutions to the problems that plague society.

Tomorrow the Right Wing ideologue Tommy Robinson will be leading a march in favour of Brexit and a massive counter demonstration is planned. These marches and inevitable political violence will change nothing. Neither Jeremy Corbyn nor Tommy Robinson have anything to offer but misery. They are two very different men but neither has the best interests of the country in mind.

Telling people that truth is as simple as hitting the share button.

We have to reach out to all around us, form coalitions, friendships between likeminded people that will allow us to join hands and refuse to be sucked into the maelstrom of uncertainty-fuelled hatred that is erupting around us.

]]>http://hurryupharry.org/2018/12/09/the-nazis-are-gone-but-human-frailty-remains/feed/0Glad to see each otherhttp://hurryupharry.org/2018/11/30/glad-to-see-each-other/
Fri, 30 Nov 2018 18:15:38 +0000http://hurryupharry.org/?p=119154There’s nothing like a common interest in murdering dissidents outside one’s own borders to bring folks together.

]]>Rivlin rejects Israel-supporting neo-fascistshttp://hurryupharry.org/2018/11/30/rivlin-rejects-israel-supporting-neo-fascists/
Fri, 30 Nov 2018 01:35:01 +0000http://hurryupharry.org/?p=119147Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, who possesses a moral compass that his fellow Likudnik Benjamin Netanyahu frequently lacks, once again has distinguished himself as a man of the Decent Right.

Responding to a CNN survey which raised serious concerns about European adults’ knowledge of the Holocaust and anti-Semitic notions, Rivlin told the network: “We must… work with the whole world to fight against xenophobia and discrimination, of which anti-Semitism is a variant.”

In the interview which was to be broadcast Thursday, the president said “There are neo-fascist movements today that have considerable and very dangerous influence, and sometimes they also express their strong support for the State of Israel.

“You cannot say, ‘We admire Israel and want relations with your country, but we are neo-fascists.’ Neo-fascism is absolutely incompatible with the principles and values on which the State of Israel was founded.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who also holds the position of foreign minister, has come under criticism for developing ties with Hungary and Poland, two countries whose leaderships have raised ire in Israel over their embrace of nationalistic policies and dismissive attitudes to the Holocaust.

“I meet leaders from all around the world – presidents and prime ministers,” Rivlin said, “and they tell me that sometimes they need to work with movements like these to build coalitions and that although they are neo-fascists they are great admirers of Israel. I tell them that this is absolutely impossible.”

Rejection of neo-fascists is a key element in confronting anti-Semitism, Rivlin said.

“The fact that the President of Israel says to neo-fascist movements, ‘You are persona non grata in the State of Israel,’ is a statement that fights anti-Semitism in a concrete way. It is a statement that makes clear that memory is important and that we will not compromise for the political expediency of the State of Israel, as Jewish as it is democratic and as democratic as it is Jewish.”